A Regional Economic Competitiveness Strategy for Northeast Ohio

Our regional economic competitiveness strategy was built around a comparative analysis of our job‑growth performance and the practices of the most successful regions. Our goal is to accelerate the pace of job creation by 50 percent and ultimately outperform the nation. Our analysis suggests we can do that by focusing on a few critical areas:

Make larger commitments to fewer industry clusters – evaluating biomedical and one or two others that will be identified. Analysis of regions that have adopted this “go-big” cluster strategy suggests it can deliver almost half of our targeted job-growth improvement.

Increase our emphasis on business retention and expansion by connecting with more companies, and executing with more consistency and quality across the region, and building more robust value chains – particularly in major industry sectors.

Continue and enhance our support to startup entrepreneurship and extend innovation and business assistance services to “scaleups” – established companies with significant growth potential. This is critical to maintain and extend growth trends from efforts already underway.